Institutions, power, and inequality

Readings and class materials for Monday, July 8, 2024–Friday, July 12, 2024

Readings

Important: The PDFs of the North and Putnam chapters are posted on iCollege.

Introduction and 5.1–5.10 in Economy, Society, and Public Policy The CORE Team, Economy, Society, and Public Policy, 2019, https://www.core-econ.org/espp/.
Tweet by Jennifer Victor
Freakonomics Radio, “Earth 2.0: What Would Our Economy Look Like?,” April 12, 2017
Planet Money, “The Dollar at the Center of the World,” episode 553, July 16, 2014
Chapter 1 in Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). (Remember to use your grad school reading skills here! Don’t try to read every word! Skim to understand the argument.)
Chapter 6 in Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). (Remember to use your grad school reading skills here! Don’t try to read every word! Skim to understand the argument.)

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: